Pros and Cons of Social Media Usage for Students
What Is The Positive And Negative Impact Of Social Media On Education
The impact of social media on education holds both positive and negative sides. There is a bunch of positive effects of social media on education which has highly transformed the educational style of the teachers and students. Actually, social media is affecting students’ academic performance at a very high pace.
This article covers the positive and negative influence of social media on educational institutes, teachers, and students as a whole.
Researchers define social media as “the relationships that exist between a network of people.”
It is a widely accessible free electronic tool, used for publishing, accessing, and collaborating any kind of socially acceptable content and information with the world, and a way to build new relationships.
Billions of People do watch and share, trillions of posts on Facebook consisting of text, photos, videos, and graphics.
According to research, YouTubers upload about 720,000 new content in a day which is equal to 30,000 videos per hour and one billion hours watched every day which becomes about 41.6 million hours per hour.
News poll estimates that 84% of teens aged 14-17 use social media and almost half of the kids aged 10-13 use social media, with young people spending up to seven hours a day on them.
Why social media is useful for students?
Here is a list that explains why social media is important in the lives of students. These are:
- Social media provides a lot of credible and relevant information and data. For instance, you can gain knowledge and insights on various topics. It helps you in analyzing the different answers and different opinions of different students. It increases your imagination and creative skills.
- Social media helps in delivering training to students with the help of the latest methodologies and help in shaping their future. It plays a dynamic role in an educational institution.
Social Media’s Impact on Education
Social media is a powerful tool in schooling that may broaden the learner’s perspective on many topics while highlighting fresh information. It allows them to interact with experts to find answers to problems they may be struggling with. Social networking has established itself as a reliable news source. As a result, it’s a wonderful platform for businesses to communicate with big groups of people.
The biggest benefit of using social media in education is that people quickly discover who the experts in various industries and disciplines are. When users start following these gurus, they will learn more about them and receive further assistance. As a consequence, they’ll be able to produce exceptional outcomes.
Pros and Cons of Social Media Usage for Students
Pros
Some of the pros of using social media include its ability to connect people together. For example, we get the opportunity to see what our family and friends are doing regardless of where they live in the world. Social media can be a powerful tool to help us maintain relationships with individuals from our past and provide us with opportunities to develop new personal and professional relationships. Although an exhaustive list of pros is beyond this article, a few are listed below. Social media can:
- Social media is a wonderful way to effectively communicate, collaborate and coordinate with peers.
- Bother teachers and students observe and familiar with new technologies
- Students can improve their skills and add value to their careers and livelihoods.
- Prompt resolution of their societal and education problems by sharing issues on social media.
- Students become more design-oriented as they apply new and creative ideas to their profiles.
- Pupils get to know about extraordinary aspects of applied education that are not being taught on the premises of the classroom.
- Quick discovery of hidden talent as they share their talent on different social media platforms. Their shared content led them to their dream work.
Positive & Negative Effect Of Social Media On Education
Cons
Just like any tool, there are some downsides to using it. Because social media is still relatively new from a historical perspective, we are still evaluating some of the negatives of using it. One of the cons is that one does not always know who is on the other end of a social media account. Fake social media accounts are easily created and false information and statements are easily circulated without proper verification. A significant con of social media is that it has taken away the privacy that most people enjoyed two decades ago. Today, privacy is an illusion. For example, in today’s world, if someone takes an unflattering picture of another, it can quickly be disseminated to thousands of people in an instant. Other downsides of using social media include:
- High distraction during classes. Students surf social media on their smartphones or laptops throughout the lecture. It has also become difficult for the teacher to observe the attention of the class participants.
- The informal environment of social media made the students careless in terms of improper grammar and spelling. Paying attention to learning and enhancing vocabulary, they completely rely on AI spelling tools.
- Students learning and retention power become extremely poor as they pay less attention.
- Book reading habits have badly suffered due to social media. Instead of referring to books, they visit social media platforms for their relevant queries.
- Ethics of information or knowledge filtering obsoleted. Young scholars copy and paste the data without knowing the source. Resultantly, the shared and selected material brings out terrible effects.
- For educational institutions, internal or private correspondence is flooded with social media, which causes them a massive loss in terms of integrity.
- Students lose the attitude of physical communication.
- A data breach can be a major cause for trapping innocent students.
- students waste their time on social media by playing games, even during exam days. This causes severe effects on both time and money as well.
- Students create fake profiles for scams and cyberbullying. Similarly, fake people get in touch with the students.